Starting and Running a Wiki Website/Introduction

Since the inception of the World Wide Web and its general acceptance in the 1990s, internet engineers have exploited the capability of linkage to endeavor deeper into the semantic purposes of the web. Long gone are the days when the web was considered an alternative to other communication media. These days however, it is anything but. From music to video, richer multimedia content has revolutionized the power of links into something far superior that it was when it was designed.

Fueled by the collective intellect of people from all corners of the globe, the Internet is growing at an accelerated speed. Internet can no longer be called a technology, Internet is the people!

People brought together under the banner of a common interest, e.g., skiing, paragliding, etc., on the Internet form an online virtual community dubbed a web community. Trivial as it may sound, the notion of a community on the web has been the subject of many a books in the past decade and people have refrained from focusing more on the core technologies that build the web like HTML, JavaScript and CSS and rather thinking of ways of manipulating user interactions, interventions and interests to weave a social network.

This book in its concise form would give its readers a bird's eye view of the basics of developing such an online community, its pros and cons along with actual examples of work by others on the concept.

Community design fundamentals for the web - Throughout this book, we will be exploring different types of communities on the web and the very basic fundamentals they are racked upon. We will also look into a chronological evolution of design for such communities and peek into community building ideologies explored into by virtual community pioneers and experts.

Tools and best practices - This book encourages the readers to focus on an array of best practices and tools for the creation of communities using key pointers from these very community researchers. Along the brick road, we may also focus on some of the many trends that are brewing towards a truly new breed of communities called Community 2.0.

Not much technical babble involved - At some points, this book might even touch some technical aspects of community design albeit only where necessary. In its entirety, this book serves only as a text supplementing core concepts of community design and would not fall into deeper technicalities of it thereof. Advice on collection and usage of user-collected data may sometimes address some technical issues.

Building upon works and not just adoption - This book would be using existing web communities as a tool to teach robust design and in no way tends to limit readers into adopting similar concepts but rather advises them to use this text to think up original and creative experiences out of the box.